The Thoughtful Dresser

Facebook group

2010-04-07T17:37:00.002+01:00

I've created a group for people interested in the US publication of The Thoughtful Dresser.

Go to Facebook for news, comments and some Q&As

Lost classics of the post-punk era

2010-04-03T09:54:00.003+01:00

New shoes

2010-03-05T16:00:00.003Z

By Clarks

US edition of The Thoughtful Dresser

2010-02-13T14:51:00.006Z

The US edition will be published by Scribner on 20 April. You can pre-order from Amazon.

Please note, this is not a collection of posts from this blog or previously published newspaper articles but a work in its own right conceived and commissioned before the blog and for which the blog was a research tool.

For my much-missed regular readers, I'm sorry for my prolonged absence but I've been working hard on a new novel to be published in January 2011.

Linda

On the return of the clumpy shoes

2009-10-22T08:40:00.004+01:00

My piece from today's Guardian

As I walked down Oxford Street a couple of weeks ago, my eyes slid to the left and I noticed a window full of sensible shoes, and they were quite nice in a modest sort of way. But in despair I saw the sign above the entrance: Clarks, the home of regulation school sandals, the shop where I was taken by my mother to have my feet measured and x-rayed with an exciting machine that could see through to the bones.

Fashion disobedience … Alexa Chung wears Russell & Bromley loafers. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Yet peering further, I noticed that the shop was crammed with fashionable young people trying on footwear with low heels and rounded toes. Venturing inside, this startling vision was confirmed. All around were rows and rows of shoes that looked comfortable. My feet sighed with pleasure at the sight of them. They had nice straps to hold them on and the soles were airy cushions of padded leather. There was not a single pair of what the magazines call "fierce heels", shoes inspired by Chinese footbinding, designed to cruelly entrap the toes in sharp points and elevate the heels to such heights that walking becomes a hobble. There were no bondage shoes at all. Nor were there many ballet flats, those flimsy little numbers with papery soles, sending shock waves up your spine every time your foot hits the pavement, making your calves scream.

The shoes in Clarks had low, stumpy heels. They were visitors from a strange world. But were they in fashion again now? Not a single magazine article had proclaimed the death of the uncomfortable shoe. At London fashion week, models continued to wobble along the catwalk in vertiginous platforms and there had been no reports in the financial pages of the decline of Manolo Blahnik (who refuses even to make wedges) or Christian Louboutin. Yet the shop seemed to be minting money. I sat down next to an exquisite Italian woman in the kind of skinny jeans that are artfully folded around the ankle, requiring the centuries of visual acuity only granted to a country of people who can wear beige without looking like a geography teacher. She carried a Prada bag, and dozens of shoes lay all around her as she kept trying on more and more pairs. Every time she cast one off, I moved them towards me.

read on

2009-10-16T07:09:00.003+01:00

Mimi Weddel and I shared a birthday. I'm always fascinated by the lives of those born on February 15. She was a New York model who breezed into Manhattan from North Dakota in 1941. According to her obituary, (she just died at the age of 94,) 'What she had wanted since the age of 16 was to put her foot on the bar of the Hotel Astor, to drink Brandy Alexanders on the St Regis hotel roof garden, to admire hats in Peacock Alley in the Waldorf Astoria.'

She was still going our on calls for modelling and acting jobs at the time of her death. She had a small part in an episode of Sex and the City. She went to the gym to stay fit, despite curvature of the spine but decreed that hats maketh the woman:

She shared an Upper East Side apartment, which she had bought cheaply in 1970, with her daughter Sarah, son-in-law, grandson and 150 or so hats, boxed and not, from the 1930s to the couture present. The film director Jyll Johnstone decided to follow Mimi around with a camera intermittently over 12 years, and called the resulting documentary, released in 2008, Hats Off. Hats On would have been more accurate. "Rise above it" was Mimi's motto, and she could rise to any headgear, however unlikely. There's a sequence in the film, in between Mimi's punishing gymnastics, tapdancing, singing and casting calls, when she takes a ride on the back of a motorbike, cool in jodhpurs, huntsman's jacket and boots. She's as elegant as Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, and almost as youthful, and she wears her visored helmet with elan. "Hats give you a frame," she said. "However dreary you feel, if you put on a hat, by golly, you've changed everything. I keep telling my daughter, my granddaughter, everybody, if you don't wear a hat, you're missing it. "

The full obituary is here

Letter from America

2009-09-17T08:22:00.003+01:00

Apologies to all of you who have been missing this blog. The fact is, I've been in another world, the world of writing a new novel, and clothes have been less on my mind. 'Harry Fenton' aka Nigel is battling various institutions of the state to get compensation for his son (we hope there will be some good news very soon).

Meanwhile, I have permission to share with you an email I recently received from Georgia, USA from a reader of the book, The Thoughtful Dresser:

Dear Linda,

I'm in the process of packing for a move to a retirement home (I'm 83) and came across your "The Thoughtful Dresser" as I was packing books. I read it not so long ago, but glancing through it I became engrossed again - a most unusual thing for me.

Being in the throes of decisions on what I can take, your writings have endorsed my desire to have with me so many of my clothes, whether practical to my new environment or not. Having my clothes, pants, jackets, shirts, shoes, boots, bags, dresses, hats, even evening wear, will make me happier, and you confirm the wisdom of what others see as imprudent.

Some of my favorite things are 40 years old, but I'm a size 6, and can still wear them should I wish to. (Actually,I was a size 8, but the fashion industry has reduced the size structures to flatter all women, so my newer clothes are 6.) But ability to wear them is not really necessary. I have shawls and scarves, belts and baubles which I never wear now, but like to admire and try on, and they give me pleasure.

A friend says, "Carol, all you need is four pairs of shoes" I told her I've packed forty pairs, and mourn those I must leave behind. I need sandals, straps, slides and boots, all in varying colors and heel heights to go with chosen dresses, skirts and pants of varying lengths. How could I possibly be content with four pairs of footwear, though they might be the ones I;d wear most of the time? I have gvien away all high heels, not because I think they're imappropriate at 83, but because they are no longer comfortable.

I think I was born to love clothes, just as I was born to love literature and learnng. At age 6 I was trying to choose my own clothes. I was a tomboy, and loved to dress in my brother's pants and shirts, but I also loved girl's things, always stressing my poor mother by choosing the most expensive classic designs that she hadn't the money to buy for me. I didn't realize I had a "fashion sense" until I met an employer who recognzed my potential and insisted upon hiring me to teach a New York department store teen "Beauty Workshop" which led to a career in fashion promotion and commentary. Later i got serious and went into health agency administration, but my love of clothes never failed.

There were periods when I couldn't afford many clothes, and other times when I could but didn't like anything in the stores. What I own now is the aggregate of many years of acquisition and carefull culling. I've gotten rid of mistakes and whims and hope now to be able to hang onto what's left. I think shopping opportunity will not be so near at my new abode; all the more reason to bring as much of what I like with me.

Please accept my plaudits for your book; it's informative, wise, amusing,well-written, and even when I disagreed, plausible. Congratulations!

Sincerely,

Carol Fox

Ting!!

2009-07-15T18:20:00.004+01:00

Check out the old dames and old geezers on Advanced Style which the Manolo kindly just sent me a link to

The right to bare arms in Iran

2009-06-19T08:44:00.003+01:00

In 1979 I went to a meeting Vancouver and heard thrilling accounts from Iranian socialist feminists about how they donned the chador to organise the revolution and depose the Shah. One cynic asked if they would be able to take the chador off again and was quickly shushed. I wonder where those Iranian feminists are today.

In 1996 I visited Iran on assignment for the Guardian. One small detail of life there I observed was that it was women in their forties and older , women who had been in their twenties and up before the revolution, who had managed to tweak and subvert the dress codes and were the most fashionably dressed. Invited to attend a wedding in Isfahan, where there were two, segregated receptions, the women without their black cloaks were dressed in a riot of colour, spangles and low bosoms.

A doctoral student at the University of Tehran who was working with the team that was bringing the internet in Iran told me that the internet would be the undoing of the regime.

The Guardian has been doing a fine job of providing live rolling coverage of what is going on which you can read here

In the same paper, Azadeh Moaveni writes of the Ahmadinejad era:

Late that summer, authorities launched a full-scale campaign of intimidation against young people they accused of un-Islamic appearance. Within a few short weeks, police detained 150,000 people, and all the women in my life went out to buy the shapeless, long coats that we had worn back in the late 1990s. Though the campaign targeted young men as well, authorities singled out women with particular brutality. The government's disdain for women increased by the day. Though Iranians fretted about the impact of western sanctions, the government turned its attention to a bill that would facilitate polygamy. Soon after, it announced a plan that would supposedly solve Iran's marriage crisis. It called the scheme "semi-independent marriage", and it amounted to a hollow version of the institution that would secure men legal and piously sanctioned sex, while denying women the security and social respectability of conventional marriage. On internet news sites and newspapers, women reacted scathingly. A girlfriend of mine, whose English classes had recently been segregated by gender, complained the government was imposing seventh-century rules on modern women

Man in suit talks about ties

2009-06-16T06:47:00.003+01:00

Amongst the recent frenetic media coverage of the juvenile behaviour of some of Gordon Brown’s former cabinet members The New Statesman has recently given us a first rate interview with the new Home Secretary , Alan Johnson.
I was aware of Mr Johnson’s working class West London roots, and his rise through the union ranks following his career choice as a postman.
But I wasn’t aware that he had been in not just one, but two, rock and roll bands.

“Within the space of three years, I left school, played in two bands, cut a record, got married, had two kids. That’s a lot to do in a short time. It was just a buzz, a real buzz, a really exciting time. I’ve never [recaptured] the excitement of playing in a band. Nothing has re-created that for me ……“it’s been kind of downhill all the way from there”.

He has an articulate take on the current political scene, and given the shenanigans that the media are so obsessed by his words and opinions are refreshingly to the point.
And how often, I wonder, does a man in a suit, let alone the Home Secretary, answer a question about his tie.
Not for him the embarrassed response of ‘oh, I don’t know where I got it / the wife gave it to me / clothes aren’t important to me. But,…..

‘Today, he wears a patterned Kenzo tie, although he insists it is “just a cheapo one. The Vivienne Westwood’s my favourite.”

Thoughts on the European elections

2009-06-08T07:49:00.001+01:00

A new MEP (elected)

and what we might do about

Harry Misses a Party

2009-06-06T20:47:00.008+01:00

Because life has been unstructured of late, what with hospital visits and live televison appearances ( a slight exaggeration) I missed another social event the other week.
It was Mick Kidd’s birthday. I met Mick last year. He is one half of the incomparable cartoon duo ‘Biff’, who have been going for a long while , and never cease to entertain me.

Their cartoons often suggest that they have been eavesdropping on conversations and dinner parties that I might well have been at ( or pleased not to have been at).
If you are not familiar with their oeuvre then there is a treat in store.
I was especially delighted to find on their website that they appear in a rather recherché magazine called The Chap ,and reveal a rather astute awareness of the finer points of menswear which I never before suspected. As it has strong literary associations I feel compelled to share it with the discriminating readers of this blog.

What's not to like?

2009-05-31T12:27:00.003+01:00

My Greek Cypriot hairdresser warned me yesterday that if I even thought of not voting for Stavros Flatley in the final of Britain's Got Talent, I could look forward to green highlights on my next visit. But why would anyone not vote for them? They reduce me to helpless giggles.

WHERE ARE THE UMBRELLAS?

2009-05-28T10:13:00.003+01:00

It was raining heavily on Tuesday morning and I was going to the gym. And the umbrella stand in the hall was empty. And there was no umbrella in the boot of the car.
And I didn’t know where they had got to. And I couldn’t remember when they had last been used, or when I had last seen them, or who might have borrowed them. And I couldn’t remember, for that matter, when it had last rained.

On Tuesday it was the six month anniversary of the fateful night in Mumbai when Will and Kelly were threatened with their lives. And said their goodbyes to one another. And I was intermittently on the end of a phone in London and at one stage did not know if my lovely son was alive.

It has been a long time. It has, in a sense, been one long extended event. And Christmas and New Year have been and long gone. And snow has happened and spring has arrived and public holidays have occurred and friends have gone away and come back and Rosie is coming to the end of her second year at university. And Will is still in hospital undergoing rehabilitation.
He is a star . Kelly is a star.
It does sometimes happen in life. A disruption to the normal flow. Of events . Of habits . Of time. When something prises you into a parallel world that runs alongside the familiar one. When what used to be important preoccupations are now barely recognised irrelevancies. You look across to the old familiar life and wonder when the tracks will intersect. ( I’m talking for myself here)

Three weeks ago Will and Kelly decided to go public with their story. They had absolutely no desire to , but they acknowledged that they needed to as they get no compensation from the UK government. And now the real world has been engaged, but in a kind of ultra way. Interactions with journalists and politicians,. Seeing images and stories in print and on TV. And messages coming in from the ether. From complete strangers and from long lost friends. Offers of help. Expressions of support . And many heartfelt greetings.

And they have been very gratified by the support that has been forthcoming.
And now that they have engaged the outside world it is sort of time for me to. And I hope I will have the kind of energy that allows me to get back to doing some of the things I enjoy. Like writing occasionally for this blog. About less important things like the disappearance of tab collars and , now that the warmer weather is here, the ghastly re-appearance of cargo pants. Or buying an umbrella.

Thank you one and all for all your kind thoughts.

Mumbai: The government concedes there's a problem

2009-05-13T07:43:00.002+01:00

Yesterday, there was a half hour interview with Will, Kelly and Nigel on Radio Five Live, which you can listen to here, and which gives a graphic account of what happened in Mumbai that night. Later that morning Tess Jowell, the minister responsible, came on and under tough questioning from the news presenter, conceded that there was an anomaly in the law and that the government was looking into changing it. Will's website will be campaigning to hold her to hger promise.

Mumbai: The aftermath

2009-05-10T17:19:00.007+01:00

For several months this site benefited from the insightful analysis of 'Harry Fenton' in real life, my friend Nigel Pike. Last November Nigel's son Will was caught up in the terrorist atrocities in Mumbai. Attempting to escape with his girlfriend Kelly Doyle from their third-floor hotel room, Will fell, sustaining serious injuries. He is facing the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

At every stage in in this cruel calamity I have been shocked by the incompetence and indifference of the Foreign Office, parts of the National Health Service and the British government which has abandoned Will, offering him a one-off payment from a Red Cross fund of a meagre £15,000. Had he been injured in a terrorist attack on British soil he would have been compensated. Had he been in a car crash, he would have been compensated. Had his injury taken place at work, he would have been compensated. But because he was the victim of a terrorist attack abroad, the government says it will give him nothing. Not a penny.

Will was a target because he was British. The terrorists went from room to room looking for British and American guests to execute. Since he returned to London from Mumbai five months ago, the British government has preferred to pretend he does not exist.

In today's Observer the full story of what happened after Mumbai is told. You can read my account here, and a report by the chief political correspondent here, and a leader here.

This morning Will and Kelly launched a website, a public appeal for a change in government policy and for funds to help them though the years ahead. You can read that here. Please do.

UPDATE
You can also listen to a radio interview with Will which went out this morning on BBC Radio Four's Today Programme

The Queen remodelled

2009-04-20T12:58:00.004+01:00

Back in the day, there was an amazing magazine called Nova, the intelligent woman's guide to life, fashion, politics and the rest. I adored it when I was a teenager.

A former journalist on the magazine, Brigid Keenan, has just emailed me with this gem, apropos the piece I wrote last week about the Queen as fashion icon:

It was in the days before you could change images on the computer, so what could have been done in a few minutes now, was an incredibly expensive and complicated affair. Basically, we had to find out the Queen's measurements and exact height (we did this at Madame Tussaud's) and then find a model of those proportions. I asked Andre Courreges to design a suit for the Queen - he made a very snappy navy and white outfit, then I got Alexandre, who was the world's top hairdresser then, to design her a hairstyle, and someone else to design the makeup. The Queen-sized model was photographed in the suit, and the hair and makeup superimposed on the image and it all ended up with the Queen looking like herself but some sort of continental, soignee version! (Apparantly she herself thought we'd made her look like Queen Fara Diba!) There was an awful hiccup at one stage because Courreges had insisted on making the skirt above-the-knee length, and when the finished pictures, which seemed to show the Queen in a mini skirt, arrived from the US (where the retouching was done) the Customs siezed them and we only got them back by negotiating with the Palace. The skirt was lengthened to an appropriate length and that was it.

I dreamed a dream: on the limitations of appearance

2009-04-18T09:03:00.006+01:00

I'm sure that there are many readers of this site who are better dressed than Susan Boyle, better looking, with better figures and more lively romantic histories. And perhaps you too (I know I do) long to step in front of Simon Cowell and belt out a number that would cause his jaw to drop. But in my case that will never happen. It will not happen because however much I dream that dream, however much I spend on the right dress, however much botox I had, I can't sing, and Susan Boyle can.

I now read that Piers Morgan is now planning to take her on her first ever date. Can no gallant man offer himself, in Morgan's place? George Clooney, please step up.

Not the West Wing

2009-04-14T21:41:00.003+01:00

scene from In the Loop released Friday which I saw at a press screening today.

Trying on Marilyn's clothes

2009-04-14T07:50:00.002+01:00

What size was Marilyn Monroe? A Times journalist tries on her clothes.

As I tentatively tried to coerce my way into the Some Like It Hot dress, Valerie Nelson, the woman charged with caring for the pieces in the Jersey exhibition, talked me through Monroe’s body shape. Monroe was 5ft 5in (I’m an inch shorter); just over eight stone (I’m ¾ of a stone heavier); she had a respectable BMI of 21 (don’t ask). She had an incredibly narrow back and rib cage but big boobs, so if she were to pop into Rigby & Peller for a bra fitting today she would probably be a 30E.
She didn’t have a long body, and although her legs were a lovely shape (beautiful bony ankles and knees) they weren’t particularly long. She had a very short rise (the distance from waist to crotch), but what made her body so extraordinary was the 13-inch difference between her breast and hip measurements and her waist. In her younger years her vital statistics would have come in at 36 23 35, and although her weight fluctuated throughout her career, she always maintained that out-of-this-world body ratio. A real life Jessica Rabbit.
Nelson tells me that they had to get a special mould made for the corset and swimwear dummies in the exhibition because Monroe was such an extreme hourglass shape that no off-the-peg dummies existed in those measurements. The Some Like It Hot dress just about zips up on me – which is pretty mortifying, considering I had always thought of her Sugar phase as a gloriously plump one.

1001 reasons not to buy cheap clothes

2009-04-14T07:34:00.004+01:00

(if you can afford better)

The Guardian reports that clothes from Primark don't sell in charity shops:

' . . . I'm surprised that so many clean items in almost pristine condition aren't sellable - anything from Primark, for instance, or one of the supermarkets, and especially children's clothes. "They're so cheap to begin with that we can't sell them," says Sue. They would take up valuable space in the small shop. Instead these clothes go in the "rag" pile - they are bought by "the rag man", who comes every week to collect the bags and pays around £100 for a load: the good clothes are sent to developing countries, the unusable ones are recycled'

Considering some of these clothes were only worn once or twice in the first place they only good thing that may ever happen in their short lives is that they're recycled to make something a bit better

Lilibet is hot

2009-04-11T11:55:00.002+01:00

A short piece of mine in today's Guardian on the new style icon, Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II:

Decades of viewing Her Majesty in canary-coloured sacks, matching handbags and two-inch heels, with her hair unchanged since her youthful profile on the stamps, we forget that once she was, if not a trendsetter, nonetheless wearing the newest styles by the hottest, albeit British, designers. In the 60s even she wore a miniskirt, demonstrating the more iron strictures of style 40 years ago, when designers dictated hemlines.
But Elizabeth II, unlike her predecessor, Elizabeth I, who appears in her portraits immolated behind ruffs and pearl-encrusted bodices, has had to wait until old age to be declared a fashion icon.

It was Vogue who started it, when, two years ago, it declared her one of Britain's most glamorous women. She was photographed by Annie Leibovitz, who only does true celebrity. Now the launch issue of Katie Grand's long-awaited style magazine Love, focusing on the fashion icons of our generation, has a naked Beth Ditto on the cover and inside, model Agyness Deyn in ice blue satin Lanvin gown, white lace gloves and tiara, dressed as the Queen. And, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Commonwealth, an exhibition of six decades of royal couture goes on display at Buckingham Palace in July so we can glimpse how her taste has altered, or not, throughout and even before her reign.
Love magazine's Deyn photo is a weird combination of HRH and Marilyn Monroe. Spookily, Monroe, had she lived, would be the same age as the Queen: the two women were born only two months apart and both came into their own in an age of postwar glamour. Even their figures - the large bust and small waist - are similar.

In which Alber Elbaz and I think the same thoughts

2009-03-31T08:00:00.004+01:00

From Lisa Armstrong in the Times, today

Elbaz isn't sure: “But they say in a recession that the one thing that doesn't go down is red lipstick.” Not that baldly commercial imperatives sway him. He used red because there have been many mornings, since the sunny, colourful collection that he designed more than a year ago (the one in all the magazines now, coveted by every woman conversant with modern clothes), when he woke up, switched on the news about Gaza or another failing bank and thought, Who Needs Fashion? “But, you know, it's almost like that moment when someone is told they have a disease. Either you say, OK, let me die now, or you say, I'm going to buy a beautiful dress, I'm going to go forward and I'm going to go back to lipstick. And do you know what? A good shoe or a good dress does something to you. It's not just about fashion victims. It really does do something for all women.”

Eccentric as this might seem to those not embalmed in fashion fluid, he is on to something. In The Thoughtful Dresser, Linda Grant's new book about clothes, she recounts the almost life-saving effects on female inmates of a consignment of red lipstick mysteriously delivered the to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly after the British Red Cross arrived in 1945.

Dancing away the Great Depression

2009-03-24T13:13:00.001Z

Hopeless miscasting

2009-03-24T11:27:00.003Z

She, is to play

Her

A change of perspective

2009-03-11T07:02:00.004Z

Here in Cornwall it is almost impossible to understand or remember why anyone would ever wear high heels. I think a counter-reaction has started, courtesy of Hadley Freeman:

Oh yes, this is the 21st century. Previously considered insurmountable barriers for women have been broken, glass ceilings shattered and exciting medical advances made daily. Yet when it comes to footwear, women seem to be voluntarily choosing to return to the days of footbinding, crippling themselves in the pursuit of neat little feet. You can't help remembering the times when women broke their ribs to narrow their waists. Plus ça change.
As you might have discerned by now, I am not a fan of high heels, never have been. In fact I've lost friends through wearing them, and I'm sure I'm not alone. The very few times I've reluctantly hoisted myself up into a pair for some social occasion, I've spent the entire evening grumpy, immobile and longing to leave. I hadn't even left the room at one such party when I heard an old acquaintance mutter - one who I haven't seen since, incidentally - "Christ, what's up with her?"
"Up" was the operative word in that question because I was up, all right - up about four-and-a-half inches in a pair of designer shoes I'd bought after having been promised that this label was the most comfortable around. Here's a hint: magazines and heel devotees often say things like, "Oh, you just haven't worn good heels. When you wear Manolo Blahnik / Jimmy Choo / Christian Louboutin shoes, you don't feel like you're wearing heels at all." They're lying. The only way you might not know you were wearing heels is if someone slipped them on your feet while you were sleeping, and even then they'd probably pinch you into wakefulness.

Another book

2009-03-08T13:57:00.003Z

Tomorrow I am going here for a week or maybe two to get on with writing another novel. As I no longer have clothes at the forefront of my attention, posts to the Thoughtful Dresser will become less frequent, I'm afraid, though I have managed to talk Harry into making a reappearance, and he says he has several ideas for posts lined up, including a Christmas purchase of a handbag, though not for himself (or me.)

Elsewhere

2009-03-04T09:12:00.001Z

William Dalrymple, writing in the Guardian today:

Few had very high expectations of Zardari, the notorious playboy widower of Benazir Bhutto. Nevertheless, the speed of the collapse that has taken place on his watch has amazed almost all observers. Across much of the North-West Frontier Province - around a fifth of Pakistan - women have now been forced to wear the burka, music has been silenced, barbershops are forbidden to shave beards and more than 140 girls' schools have been blown up or burned down. From the provincial capital of Peshawar, a significant proportion of the city's elite, along with its musicians, have decamped to what had, until yesterday's attack, been regarded as the relatively safe and tolerant confines of Lahore and Karachi.

Very expensive shoes

2009-03-04T08:02:00.004Z

Balmain, £975

I was looking at a pair of very beautiful £1000 Ferragamo shoes in Grazia yesterday and wondering who buys £1000 shoes? Who are these for? Is this the new price of a shoe which the rest will, as it were, inch up to?

But I remembered a phone call I had the other day from someone with high placed retail contacts who told me that fashion no longer caters for London women, even rich London women. The crazy shoe and crazier bag are for our guests from Russia and the oil states. If they are holding up our retail economy with their slender manicured fingers, perhaps we should be grateful. Otherwise I would have to buy three and a third pairs of £300 shoes.

Bewigged, bothered and bewildered

2009-03-03T07:10:00.005Z

Independent columnist and literary man-about-town John Walsh, having read The Thoughtful Dresser
(book) asks in the Independent today why and in what ways men care about what they wear:

Men can be quivering violets about clothes and what they say about them. Recently, I met a judge at a party (it's so weird when the High Court judges start looking younger) who told me how uncomfortable judges are with their new judicial garb. A year ago, the judiciary agreed to abolish horsehair wigs and black robes (except in criminal cases) and kit out judges in groovy blue gowns, designed by Betty Jackson. How, I asked, did the judges like their new look?
"They hate it," said my friend. "They think they lack all dignity and gravitas – especially if they're thinning a bit on top. They say they feel half-dressed without a wig." They're reduced, in other words, from stern embodiments of the super-ego to mere, humble, fallible-looking men.
Elsewhere, there are signs that chaps have gone a tad precious about chaps' clothing. The Daily Mail, always reliably dirigiste on garments, ticked off Alexander Lebedev and Andrew Marr for appearing in the latter's TV show in less than full canonicals. The paper called Lebedev "casually attired," but fairly smacked Marr around the head for wearing denims. "A disquieting sight," it shuddered. "No jeans, Andrew, please."
For some chaps, civilisation itself is threatened by the packaging of powerful men in working men's garb. In America, President Obama is under fire for his attempts to be casual in bright blue jeans and white trainers. "Get back into your sensible skinny suits pronto," is the message from the Democratic faithful: "Who do you think you are, George Bush?"
The semiotics of clothing is everywhere. Note how readily Sir Fred Goodwin got himself photographed by the media wearing his country-gentleman-at-a-shoot attire rather than anything that smacked of a) banking, or b) the City. Notice how Tony Blair, even in the boiling heat of Gaza, wears a tightly buttoned club tie to emphasise the unearthly gravity of his role as Middle East envoy; when he was PM, he'd have jettisoned the tie at the airport.

Released from shame

2009-03-02T15:07:00.003Z

I received this email from tv producer Angela Wallis who has given her permission for me to reproduce it:

I am a TV producer and while researching a programme about recession chic I came across your article in this Saturdays Guardian Magazine and from there I found an extract of your book The Thoughtful Dresser.

I was struck by the description of shopping with your mother, and how while shopping her true self reappeared. I too was raised by a Jewish mother in Manchester and the similarities to my experiences of shopping with her were uncanny. My mother always planned her shopping expeditions as a day out, a thing you did even when you did not need to buy a thing, often involving an elegant lunch stop at Kendal’s or the Kardoma Cafe. To this day I still see shopping in a similar way and have indulged in its delights for all my adult life. Having read the extract of your book I feel like an addict who has been released from her shame, a feeling experienced all the more when my more intellectual friends who would never dream of coming shopping with me had no problem encouraging me to visit art galleries, museums and even worse, films with subtitles. They would treat my at oneness with department stores with a wry smile that would make me feel like the shallow nueveax rich Gucci socialists persona I tended to adopt in their company. Now I can claim that a joy of shopping and of spending time among beautiful things is in itself a higher activity than simple consumerism.

A Marxist writes

2009-03-02T12:17:00.005Z

Emeritus professor of Government at Manchester University, Norman Geras, author of Marx and Human Nature and 'The Controversy about Marx and Justice' refutes in a new post on his blog the notion alluded to in The Thoughtful Dresser that shopping is often dismissed byt critics from the left as a form of false consciousness. Refutes, that is, their accusation.

He writes:

So, the first step in my defence is just to say that, in the way that the world is now organized, shopping is a straightforward means towards taking care of one's appearance; it's the instrumentality of a basic human good. But, it might be said, this is just shopping of the kind anyone can do - even me, even people who take no special joy from the activity but treat it in a matter of fact way, as the mere means to a necessary end. A deep interest in shopping such as Linda describes and commends is not necessarily part of taking care of one's appearance. We can shop instrumentally without developing any deep interest in shopping, shop without passion.

However - the second step in the defence - one can do anything without developing a deep interest in that particular thing, without its becoming a passion. All the same, people do - they develop passions of one kind and another. They become passionate collectors of this or that - books, stamps, art - passionate about literature or music or movies or sport (or just about their team), become bird-watchers, train-spotters, students of many different kinds of subject. Each of us has a life to dole out as we see fit, subject to meeting our various obligations to others. An interest in shopping is as legitimate a pursuit within the range of human interests as any other. Save for those who urge upon us an ethic of devoting all our disposable time and resources to helping people in need, no one is well placed to condemn the interest someone else may have in shopping. And the ethic of comprehensive self-sacrifice may be good for saints, but applied to the generality of humankind it is mean and unbearable.
But what about shopping as an obsession? What when it becomes pathological? The problem, then, is with the obsession, the pathology, not with the shopping. Any pursuit can be taken too far. And what about the fact that not everyone is in a position to enjoy shopping, because some don't have the means for it? This is a critique of systemic inequality and poverty and their effects and it is a valid one. But deployed by anyone who has disposable income which they use for (non-shopping) enjoyments of their own rather than directing it towards people living closer to the margins, it is a hypocrisy. Unless you believe that those living above the level of the bare necessities - whatever these are taken to be - should part with all their surplus income, you allow that each of us has a right to some enjoyments. It is not then for you to say what mine should be or vice versa. I won't be going round with Linda spending time looking at scarves. I doubt she'd want to join me in following all five days of a Test match. You plays it as you feels it. But there is a right to that for everyone.

Man goes shopping

2009-03-02T11:23:00.002Z

I received this interesting email from a male friend over the weekend, describing his shopping strategy:

If I want to buy a £75 external hard drive for my computer for example, I will go and look at them in at least four shops, asking each sales assistant for an opinion. Then I will read up on the model I finally decide upon in Which or other reports. If I could find someone who uses one of these I would ask them if they made the right decision and where they bought theirs. As a final act to convince myself I will go online to see if I can buy the model cheaper and if this doesn't bring a result, after about two weeks have gone by, I will go back to the shop and make my purchase. I think the word people use to describe this method of purchasing is called 'agonising.' On the other hand, I have been with [my wife] who has seen completely by chance an item of clothing on the rack for £150 and 90 seconds later the credit card is being swiped. But I really do have a lot of fun using my method and am reminded of that fun every time I use the item

Bearing gifts

2009-02-27T13:58:00.002Z

What words are there to describe a friend who brings to your publication dinner, as a celebratory gift, a pair of Prada shoes? Which fit.

Fit to wear Judy Garland's ruby slippers is what I would say about that friend

To the shops

2009-02-27T08:51:00.004Z

The Guardian today has an extract from the imminently about to be published The Thoughtful Dresser - book:

My mother, who died at the age of 81 from a condition called vascular dementia, could not remember the beginning of a short sentence by the time she was approaching its conclusion, which more or less eliminated from her diminishing world the pleasures of conversation. In the last weeks of her life, the part of her brain that controlled language began to malfunction and she started to speak in weird phrases which, if you listened to them carefully enough, were made up of words and syllables from both English and Yiddish, her first language, which during the long years of her illness she appeared to have completely forgotten.
Her last full, coherent, grammatically intact message to the world was uttered to my sister: "I like your earrings." Her last words to me as mother to daughter, the person she knew to be her daughter and not merely someone she knew she knew, had been stated a few months earlier: "I don't like your hair."
But before she became immobilised by incontinence and other terrible afflictions, the one activity in which my mother was still capable of participating, heart and soul, with a fully functioning mind, was shopping for clothes. She would wander along the street crying and moaning, with me gripping her arm for fear she would fall into the traffic. Her own fate was terrible to her, and she knew it. Then we would get to the small clothing section of the Upper Street [Islington] branch of Marks & Spencer and her identity re-formed; she was a human being once again, capable of assessing the quality of knits and whether this season's hemlines were flattering on her small frame. The shopper's soul-shout, "I want!", raced through her bloodstream. Once, I pointed out that M&S had introduced a delivery service for certain postcodes. "Oh, yeah?" she said. "And you'll pay through the nose for it." But a second or two later she was grasping my arm and asking had I seen the sign that announced that M&S now delivered to certain postcodes.
I took her to buy an outfit for my sister's wedding. As soon as she had ascended the escalator she seized on a Ralph Lauren skirt and Jaeger blouse. She scurried around the store holding fabrics together, "because I've got to match the navy". She cried and stamped her foot when the blouse was too big in the collar, revealing her ruined neck. I understood for the first time that she always wore a little scarf not because her old bones were cold, but because she understood the feminine arts of concealment, how to cover and flatter. She had no intention of being mutton dressed as lamb.
The outfit, which I paid for, cost a bomb. In the taxi back to the home where my sister and I had incarcerated her against her will when she was considered no longer able to function alone, she held her shopping bags with a radiant face, looked at me, eyes milky with innocence and bewilderment. "How are we related?" she asked.
My mother shopped because shopping was what she did and what she was good at. She had an unerring capacity to enter any store and pick out the most expensive item in it; she had a fantastic eye. Even though she almost never had the money to buy the best thing in the shop, she knew what the best thing was, and following on from that, the calculations you needed to make in order to get as close to it as possible: such as when the sales started, or where you could get really good copies, or which secondhand shops had the kind of stock she was looking for.
She had, in other words, taste. And she learned her taste from a variety of sources, such as reading magazines and listening to friends' recommendations, but above all, she spent a great deal of time actually in the shops, looking at things and learning how to discern the good, the bad and the very best. Friends queued up to go shopping with her, for they knew she would take them to the right places and make them try on the things that she knew would suit them.
Poor her, running headlong into the 1960s and a daughter who deliberately frayed the hems of her jeans and wore a handbag made out of a bit of old carpet, instead of Young Jaeger. But, of course, all daughters eventually turn into their mothers, and she had encoded herself inside me already.
Most hostile responses to shopping see it as an act of acquisition, of avarice and greed for things that we do not need but advertising and marketing have made us think we want, a condition that Marx called "false consciousness". We are dupes, and only the strong individualist can hold out against mass consumption. And there are others, of course, who truthfully say that they have no political objection to shopping but they just can't stand it as an activity and regard it as a waste of time.
Against whom I would set those of us who regard it as a pleasure. What does this pleasure consist of, and why do others not experience it; why do they feel, instead, a sense of panic, overwhelmed by what they describe as "too much choice"? Why do I like looking at other people's gardens, while content to allow my own to degenerate into a badly designed, overgrown jungle of strangled plants and rapacious weeds? Because I can't be bothered going out there to do the work of making it bloom. I watch the flowers wither and die from lack of water, and mourn them. But if I wake up and know, at the moment of the mind streaming back from dark into light and consciousness, that what a new navy linen jacket needs is a scarf with a bit of red in it, then I will have ants in my pants until I can get to the shops to find that scarf.
Shopping. A gerund that did not exist before the middle of the 18th century because it did not exist in the way we understand it now. It involved the single revolutionary and emancipatory act of middle-class women with disposable income being able to leave the house. Before this, the goods, or the people who made them, came to the house, either the tailors and seamstresses or the pedlars who sold door-to-door to the poor.

read on

Catherine Hill: The clothes on her back

2009-02-25T14:37:00.004Z

BBC Radio Four Woman's Hour today ran an interview with Catherine Hill, the chief interviewee in The Thoughtful Dresser (the book). You can listen to it online here

Catherine W. Hill is the doyenne of Canadian style. She set up and ran the influential boutique Chez Catherine in Toronto where she championed many Italian designers like Armani, Versace and Ferre at the beginning of their careers in the 70’s. Having survived Auschwitz and been amongst thousands of naked shivering women, Catherine has a deep understanding of our need to be clothed and our need for beauty. She believes her own desire to look pretty helped her survive the Holocaust. Jenni talks to her about the connections between her love of fashion and the concentration camp, and the therapeutic value of clothes in her life and the lives of women everywhere.
Linda Grant’s “The Thoughtful Dresser” which features Catherine’s story, is published by Virago on March 5th price £11.99, ISBN 9781844085569.

42 dresses with sleeves

2009-02-24T08:05:00.004Z

At the Ossie Clark show yesterday morning. Sleeves. Sleeves. Yet more sleeves. Thank you.

Last night's Jaeger show

2009-02-23T19:39:00.002Z

I managed to have quite a long talk with Karen Boyd, the Jaeger London designer, at the after-party last night, but such were the strength of the lychee and vodka cocktails, I can't really remember anything about it.

I imagine in the Autumn I'll be wearing this

The week ahead

2009-02-21T07:51:00.003Z

We're coming up to publication of The Thoughtful Dresser which you can order from Amazon (see side panel) or if you're abroad, with free delivery worldwide from The Book Depository.

There will be an extract in the Guardian to which I'll give you the heads up once they've confirmed the day. On Wednesday, the book's chief interview will be appearing on Woman's Hour. Catherine Hill was seventeen when she was transported to Auschwitz with her parents who did not survive. She arrived in Canada as a refugee after the war and from the sixties built a career as the fashion maven of Toronto, famous for her Yorkville shop, Chez Catherine. She'll be appearing with me at an event in London at Jewish Book Week chaired by Linda Kelsley, a former editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, (everyone welcome, even practising Wiccans). On Saturday I'll be at the Bath Festival taking about The Clothes On Their Backs. And there will be a second extract in the Guardian magazine.

The following Monday, March 2, I'll be on Start the Week and later that evening, Nightwaves. And sometime in the next few days you should actually be able to get the book.

Viral video of the week

2009-02-20T10:22:00.001Z

Portfolio: an update

2009-02-20T06:46:00.005Z

Yesterday I went in to Marks and Spencer's at their invitation to take a look at the Portfolio range for over 45s in the flesh, so to speak. At the Marble Arch store, there were some fabulous things: a Limited Edition tunic dress which looks as if it has missed its way en route to Net a Porter and several Autograph silk dresses and tops I loved.

But Portfolio. No. Not for me.

I looked around for the calf-length denim skirt but could not see it. And do you know why, ladies? Because it has sold out. Yes, the Portfolio range is massively popular and the denim skirt has flown off the rails. What does this tell us? It tells us that M&S is serving its customers. The one's who want affordable Marni look-alikes, and the ones who want to look like early 1980s geography teachers.

Across Britain there are tens of thousands of women who want to dress like frumps. Is this a crime? Personally, I think it should be, but I am an adamant supporter of freedom of expression, even when that freedom is the joy of beige.

I was taken upstairs to the press showroom and shown some of the next batch of stock and there were some big improvements, quite a few things I liked.

But I made the point as comprehensively as I could, that M&S like much of the rest of the high street is making far too many sleeveless dresses that rise above the knee. This will be passed on. We live in hope.

PS M&S also say that they now ship overseas.

The new curve

2009-02-19T07:42:00.003Z

I notice that whereas fat women were once called fat (and many other things, as if being fat were something the Nuremberg laws should have dealt with) they are now referred to as women with curves. 'I am proud of my curves,' I read recently, of a woman with a big bum and bosom. I wonder if the hanging part of the upper arm can now be referred to as a curve?

Giorgio Armani has a blog!

2009-02-18T17:40:00.002Z

Yes, it actually is him.

This morning, I was dressed in navy and ready to go at 7:40 a.m. I went straight to the store to check the L.E.D. lights that they had installed the night before over the entire exterior of the store. The lights are tiny dots that oscillate to create moving images on the surface, and I’m very pleased with the results. At 9 a.m., I headed up to 166th Street with Caroline Kennedy. It was the first time I’ve ever met her, and I found her to be very refined, with impeccable manners.Luckily she speaks French, which is my second language.
. . .
just got back from lunch at Swifty’s, where I had a plate of spaghetti carbonara, two glasses of red wine and watched all of the elegant couples dining in their nice clothes and fancy earrings. I feel much better. After lunch, I hopped back to my apartment for a 15 minute power nap. I always take a very quick nap after lunch. I think this is probably rather Italian, no? Even just a quarter of an hour of rest completely regenerates me and allows me to run back to work. I needed the break after a marathon of interviews this morning in the restaurant on the top floor of my new store. Since I do not speak English, I use a translator to help out. I’m the king of multitasking, even during interviews. While she repeats things back in English, I use the 10 second break to tell my staff in Italian how to set the tables. I oversee every single aspect of my business and stores, and I’m very attentive to the details; even how the candles are placed on each table is essential. There is so much to do before Tuesday night — and I am not great at delegating. I like to be a part of everything, including how the curtains hang.

Riveting interview with Sonia Rykiel

2009-02-18T07:58:00.002Z

Dotty and very, very smart.

Throughout our interview Rykiel refers to herself in the third person as “the creator”, alongside “the author”, “the poet” and “the painter,” Often incorporating words into her designs, she once told the International Herald Tribune’s Suzy Menkes: “I feel more like a novelist than a fashion designer.”

Is there such a thing as intelligent fashion, I ask? “I don’t know,” she admits, touchingly. “All I can say is that it’s what I try to do. It doesn’t matter one damn bit whether fashion is art or not. You don’t question whether an incredible chef is an artist or not – his cakes are delicious and that’s all that matters. Fashion is there to serve a purpose.”

Just when you presume to think what Rykiel’s take on a certain subject is, she proves you wrong. When I ask whether celebrity came as an unwelcome partner to success, she shakes her head. “No, no. I wanted to be recognised – that really interested me. And as I’ve got older it means more and more to me, because celebrity is recognition of what I have achieved.

"This is an unbelievably difficult job and one I drain myself doing. They recently had a retrospective of my work here in Paris and I walked around it thinking that had it not been by me I would have been thinking: 'My God this woman is wonderful’.

Michelle Obama at New York Fashion Week

2009-02-18T07:51:00.002Z

Michelle Obama's social secretary, Desiree Glapion Rogers, has been attending all the shows at fashion week, acording to Hillary Alexander.

Asked whether she was keeping an eye out for any designs which might be suitable for the First Lady, she smiled and gave me a big wink.

Ms Rogers, 49, a prominent Chicago businesswoman, is a close friend of the Obama family and was part of the campaign’s fundraising team. She was once married to the Chicago millionaire, John Rogers, and has a daughter studying at Yale.

Between the covers

2009-02-17T09:32:00.002Z

The book of The Thoughtful Dresser will be published in two weeks. You can order it from Amazon (see side panel). The US edition will not appear for another year, I'm afraid, but if you're keen you can place international orders with The Book Depository, with free shipping worldwide. They have fulfilment centres globally and it's the best way to buy outside the UK. Click the link here to pre-order.

In which I am suddenly of interest

2009-02-17T09:03:00.005Z

There are only three women in senior management positions on the British High street - Belinda Earl at Jaeger, Kate Bostock at M&S and Jane Shepherdson who joined Whistles from Top Shop. Shepherdson has engineered a buy-out from the Icelandic firm Baugur which hit the iceberg of the Icelandic financial collapse.

The under 25s with jobs and no mortgages, still living at home, continue to shop like it's 2005, but the over 40s are thinking much more carefully about how we spend, and it is to us that fashion is now looking. Shepherdson says:

"It's an exciting time. For years, there hasn't been anything to separate what 18-year-olds and 40-year-olds are wearing. We've all been buying the same things. But now there's a polarisation. There are things now that girls are wearing - like wet-look leggings - I couldn't possibly think of putting on. That's great, I think. Because what it's forced us to say is, what is anyone else going to wear?"
. . .
So what does a grown woman want? "It's the same, in a way," Shepherdson insists. "We want fashion. That isn't going to go away. We want to wake up and feel there's something new we want to wear. We don't want dumbed-down stuff. Classic, basic and understated is not the way through - if you look at something like that, you think 'No, I've already got it'. What you really need is something like a new silhouette to act on."
The day after Shepherdson sealed the new deal, she did what many women do when feeling good - she went shopping, bagging two pairs of Fendi shoes in a lunchtime. In fashion, the emotional and personal is also professional opportunity. "I love this obsession with shoes," she laughs, looking down at the pointy Chloé ankle boots she's wearing under Whistles jeans. "We haven't had a chance to get into it at Whistles, but we are soon. The thing is, you can wear quite plain clothes, but all you've got to do to make it sexy and glam is put on a fierce, aggressive pair of shoes and it completely modernises it. And I think that applies at whatever age."

I think she is right about one thing. If we are going to spend we want it to be special. No duplicates, few safe classics. No half-hearted purchases. You have to feel the love.

In the bleak midwinter

2009-02-16T07:11:00.003Z

It's possible to go through life in complete ignorance of what others do in the privacy of their own homes, until you pick up a newspaper which alerts you to this

Patrica Field ad nauseam

2009-02-14T16:56:00.003Z

Does Patricia Field have to style every fashion film?

Ossie Clark sale preview

2009-02-14T10:34:00.003Z

Cocosa has a number of Ossie Clark items on sale at really good discounts of 50 per cent and up. Here's the dress I wore to the Booker (mine was in black and blue) reduced from £750 to £299 and the iconic blouse of this past season which the designer Avsh Alom gave me, reduced from £250 to £109.

You can join Cocosa if you haven't done already using this voucher. The sale opens noon, Monday.

Spring

2009-02-13T08:10:00.005Z

The new Jaeger Spring-Summer collection has hit the shops. Yesterday I acquired the above items. I realise I keep banging on about this, but as I put them away, I understood how most of what I actually wear at the moment is Jaeger. The black and colour print top with black jeans. The cuff with an LBD. The broiderie anglais dress with my new Nicole Farhi shoes. But not the tie belt. It's an A line without it.

Glad to be grey

2009-02-12T09:16:00.003Z

After widespread agreement yesterday that the new Marks and Spencer Portfolio range for women over the age of 45 is dire, I can't help but notice that some of the reviews of the actual clothes on the M&S site glow with approval.

Here is a woman from Lincoln on that denim skirt:

at last a denim skirt that fits. nice fit around the hips attractive plaited belt. comes in two lengths. the hem swings as you walk it made me feel 10 years younger and ready to dance. a must have for every girls wardrobe.

I can't help but notice that the writer signs herself 'frumpymama'. This raises a question. Do middle-aged women wear dreary clothes because they don't know better and the scales would fall from their eyes if you showed them Marc Jacobs, or do they actually like this sort of thing? Do they look in the mirror and think, This is fabulous. I look great.

Or is that they actively wish to buy and wear clothes which make them look anonymous, invisible and so blank they they are a grey mist in the air? And is that a bad thing? If that's want you want? I think it is a bad thing, but feel free to disagree.

Let them wear polyester

2009-02-11T12:08:00.004Z

I have often thought that if there were a national referendum on whether to scrap either the Royal Family or Marks and Spencer's, it would be the tiaras and state banquet dinner services that the removal men would be wrapping up in tissue paper, not bundles of reasonably priced reinforced gusset knickers.

So much as I hate kicking M&S, (I am currently wearing a pair of their jeans) I cannot help agree with Sarah Mower's account of its new Portfolio range, aimed at the over-50s:

If there's one thing worse than mutton dressed as lamb, it's mutton dressed as mutton. I wanted to approve of M&S's Marie Helvin-promoted Portfolio range, but wild horses wouldn't drag me into that stuff. I just can't see how it's supposed to offer anything different from the rest of the M&S stock, and the attempt at "elegance" for the over-50s is worse than patronising.
What woman (of any age) could possibly want a pair of pull-on jersey bell-bottoms with gold "sailor" buttons? For a start, the shape is not fashionable in any sense. Second, the thought of what they would do to anyone's backside and thighs is enough to make one cry. And third… hang on, aren't these just souped-up versions of the synthetic slacks M&S has sold since time immemorial? I had a Saturday job in Bath's M&S as a schoolgirl, and I know of which I speak. At that age, I hoped someone would shoot me before I got old enough to need flared crimplene bottoms.

As we all thought

2009-02-10T16:06:00.003Z

Sceptics of the harem pants point is proved

Up where the air is rare

2009-02-10T15:51:00.005Z

I wonder if there is any way of democratising the couture collections short of plebs like me actually buying something. I do not wish the couture shows to die for want of customers. They represent the pinnacle of what is possible in that humble object, clothing, as a Picasso transcends pigment and canvas. Observe the above shot from Valentino which resembles a Busby Berkely set.

But if they aren't to dwindle, we're going to need to buy a piece. I would suggest selling in-depth video downloads on the internet, but as any fule no, no-one can make money from the internet. Or is that no longer true?

Dolce & Gabanna tux at the Baftas

2009-02-10T07:31:00.003Z

Fat, dirty and dishevelled will be coming to a catwalk near us very soon

An architect pays a visit

2009-02-09T23:57:00.003Z

On Saturday an architect came round. I wanted to discuss with him some building work on my flat. The plans I had turned out not to be viable. The only way I could have what I wanted was a far more extensive and costly renovation. My interest ebbed away, and then he mentioned three words.

You know how drug dealers give their victims a free hit of heroin?

Just three words, and now I have lost interest in this blog because I am immersed in design and and interiors magazines.

In America you take these three words for granted, but not here in Britain and especially not in flats in late Victorian houses.

Simon Doonan dispenses advice

2009-02-07T05:55:00.002Z

I like Simon Doonan. He used to dress the windows at Barney's and now he's the creative director. He's a rather flamboyant English queen and since Quentin Crisp, New York has always held out its arms to flamboyant English queens. Shame Oscar Wilde had to die in a hotel room in Paris:

What is your one piece of fashion or beauty advice? Wear your fab clothes every day. Keeping your best clothes for parties is the same as leaving the plastic on your lampshades. There are limitations, though; nobody wants an invasive medical procedure performed by a doctor in a Cavalli sequined unitard.

New blog

2009-02-07T05:39:00.004Z

I've added to the blog role Juliet Warkentin's blog. A former editor of Marie Claire, she is the content director at WSGN, the fashion industry trend forecasting site originally established by Marc Worth and his brother. The WSGN site is subscription only but Juliet has contacted me to let me know about the site's blog, which is full of useful information.

Enter the trophy jacket

2009-02-07T05:26:00.003Z

Here's a lovely little video of Jess Cartner-Morley, the Guardian's fashion editor, trying on trophy jackets.

The trophy jacket is this year's It bag, you see.

Joan Burstein on the recession

2009-02-05T08:50:00.003Z

Joan Burstein (Mrs B) owner of Browns boutique on South Molton Street, who saved up her clothing ration coupons in 1947 to buy her first New Look dress, who went bust in the Sixties and built up her business again from scratch, and who discovered John Galliano, has this to say:

"It's important to be positive when times are hard, but to those who are facing having to start again now I would say this: to have got where you did, you must have had talent, so use it again – and be humble, accept advice and work hard. I worked very hard, and now, I think, it's important to be doing my bit for British businesses because this is our economy and we're stuck with it."

This recession, she says, feistiness creeping into her voice, only feels different to the last one "because then we didn't have it blaring at us from everywhere. Yes, we had a bad time in November but we did well in December. The bottom line is that people still want to buy, and if they haven't got the money they'll save to buy the things that they want.

"There's too much doom and gloom, but I promise you this: people still aspire to own things."

New bag

2009-02-05T08:18:00.006Z

A couple of times a year a man appears at my door with a handbag for me from Anya Hindmarch. This is the Jackson. Ivory glace leather with a patent insert and lock and a leather covered chain shoulder strap. Except that yellow bit is blue on mine.

Retail meltdown

2009-02-04T12:15:00.003Z

Baugur, the Icelandic company which owns a large number of high street shops in Britain, has gone bust. Its portfolio includes Hamleys, House of Fraser, jewellers Mappin and Webb and Watches of Switzerland. Enter Sir Philip Green with a shopping list.

A Baugur spokesman explained that talks with the Icelandic banks had collapsed last night. He said that the application "to enter into the moratorium process" - the equivalent of America's Chapter 11 protection - would give the company protection from its creditors for three weeks.
The spokesman also insisted that the day-to-day operations of the companies owned by Baugur would not be affected by today's news.
"The last thing we want to do is fuel fear on the high street that jobs will be lost," he said.
One rival retail executive said selling any retail businesses would be a tough task: "Most of these businesses are doing okay and their managements have been trying to organise buyouts for some time. But it is just impossible to get any financing. The banks just aren't doing any lending. The private equity people have got money but they are still dependent on being able to put debt in as well."
Shares in French Connection slumped by 10% this morning. More than 20% of its shares are owned by a group of Icelandic investors including Baugur. Debenhams shares slipped by 3% this morning.

They own or have stakes in:
French Connection

Mosaic Fashions

Coast

Karen Millen

Oasis

Odille

Principles

Shoe Studio Group

Warehouse

Whistles

Jane Norman

All Saints

Day Birger et Mikkelsen

Matthew Williamson

Steinunn

SD&R

Arcticgroup

Department stores:

Debenhams

House of Fraser

Illum

Magasin Du Nord

Souk

Saks

Food:

Iceland

Speciality:

Hamleys

Aurum

Goldsmiths

Mappin & Webb

Watches of Switzerland

Wyevale Garden Centres

eCommera

Frosty by Frost French

2009-02-04T07:46:00.003Z

Jess Cartner-Morley has an absolutely delightful piece in the Guardian today about snow person chic:

Eighteen years is a long time in fashion. The last time there were this many snowmen, John Major was in Downing Street and MC Hammer was on Top of the Pops. Grunge hadn't even happened, let alone been revived. Hemlines were on their way down, along with the stockmarket.
As befits the over-sharing Facebook generation, this year's snowpeople are an exhibitionist bunch. An abundance of bikini wearing suggests that the modern snowlady has been much influenced by Lady Gaga, pop singer of the moment, who garnered a blizzard of media attention last month for undertaking a promotional blitz of London dressed in knickers, sunglasses and little else.
Among the male snow population, the Raymond Briggs look has undergone a similar update. Skinny scarves of the type favoured by Russell Brand and Johnny Borrell of Razorlight have gained ground over chunky knitwear. And the influences of Pete Doherty and Justin Timberlake can perhaps be sensed in a certain dastardly slant of the hat.
For a snowperson, fashion is all in the accessories. One enterprising character picked up on the trend for oversized buttons by replacing the traditional lumps of coal with cucumber slices.
But snowmen remain aloof from some of the vagaries of fashion. The trend for size zero models and celebrities seems to have had mercifully little impact on the BMI of the great British snowman. Anyone concerned that the younger generation's distorted body image would express itself in snowmen with hewn clavicles and wearing Spanx can relax: a full face and a well-rounded tummy are still desirable attributes in snowpeople of both genders.

Do read the whole thing

Let them eat shoes

2009-02-04T06:48:00.003Z

I have a feeling that we are going to be knitting tunic dresses and dhoti pants at the guillotine when we come to cut off the heads of couturiers.

Roger Vivier showed a pair of £30,000 shoes this week:

They feature an assortment of life's little luxuries such as 24 ct gold-coated mesh, semi-precious stones, jet, satin ribbons, silk chiffon, diamanté and crocodile skin fashioned into dainty rosettes.

The "Dovima", an 11cm, spike-heeled confection of gilded silk mesh and jewels, is embellished with a pair of rose pink-dyed, taxidermy birds with gold and crystal heads.

Another style called "Daphne", in honour of the best-dressed socialite and millionairess, Daphne Guinness, the ex-wife of Greek shipping heir, Spyros Niarchos.

They are a midnight lace creation of jet, silk, crocodile and satin bows.

The collection of six hand-made creations, starting at £9,500 a pair and rising up to a stratospheric £30,000.

They were unveiled during the Paris Haute Couture season this week.

The best thing since chocolate

2009-02-03T07:52:00.006Z

If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch then your life is about to be transformed by this little girls' gadget

You take photographs of all your clothes, upload them to the app, and then put together outfits. (I now know I have twenty bags, after a major clear-out last year.) You even click on when you wore an item last so you can scroll down and see if you've got value for money for that sale dress

The etiquette of gentlemen's snow wear

2009-02-03T07:27:00.008Z

Watching the news last night, I could not help but notice that every single reporter standing in the snow reporting on wrecked cars/stranded commuters/snowmen were wearing a Michelin Man jacket with the words the North Face embroidered in the breast. A brand new to me (I have a Nicole Farhi shearling) - do they show in New York or Milan?

Meanwhile in this little BFI film from the snowy winter of 1963, we see a steam train set out alone the English landscape as it were en route from Moscow to Novosibirsk. Tough navvies clear the snow from the tracks wearing what appear to be tweed jackets, caps, mufflers and in one case, the hint of a tie. And bare hands. The train driver, obviously, wears a tie, as do the passengers.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

2009-02-02T10:38:00.004Z

North London goes for a minimalist palette

UPDATE
This is so exciting. The most snow we have had for 18 years in London and it is still snowing. There are no buses and not much underground service either, and our London parks are full of people tobogganing.

This evening there will be an all-comers snowball fight in Trafalgar Square

In Regent's Park

Cue Dallas theme tune

2009-02-02T09:22:00.002Z

How to dress for the Eighties revival, god help us. Advice from Sam Fox

Everything was big - the jewellery, the shoulder pads, the hair. Everybody had a perm, and then you put rollers in to make it even bigger. There was a hairspray called Hard Rock - your hair didn't move for three days.
The makeup was quite ghastly - blue eye shadow and dark lip-liner with a paler lipstick, really Jodie Marsh - so I tried to tone it down and went big on hair and accessories. Butler & Wilson was where we all used to go for jewellery. For a dress for a night out, it was all sequins, very Dynasty. Jumpsuits were a great look, especially for women who wanted to hide a bit of a bulge.
We wore a lot of ripped denim. You ripped your own. On the cover of Touch Me, my first single, I didn't want to show my boobs because I had just finished being a page 3 girl. My mum and I came up with the idea of ripping a hole in the bum of my jeans. It was just a bit cheeky, you know? I also used to like wearing a denim jacket with lots of bling on it, which me and my mum also made - my auntie had just died and we took her old crystal jewels and sewed them on. You would wear ripped denim with Converse trainers. They're huge again now, aren't they? It's almost as if I could go into the attic and dig everything out again, though it might be a bit mouldy.

'I drew in Dior'

2009-02-01T10:02:00.004Z

Katherine Whitehorn was the journalist who inspired me to be a journalist, when I was a teenager in the Sixties. Stylish, witty and intelligent, she was the model career woman.

Here she is returning to the Paris collections after a first visit in 1956 and recording the differences:

But just about everything else has changed since I was the Observer's fashion editor in the very early 1960s - let alone when I was flung into the job of covering the collections for Picture Post in 1956 because the only other girl on the magazine had left for the south of France with the sacked editor. Last week I was in Paris with the Observer's fashion editor, Jo Jones, and her deputy, Helen Seamons, to gawp and report on how different things have become.
The shows aren't, for a start, held in the same places. No more the silky, scented salons of the couture houses themselves, but an outside venue, which can be Lacroix on the entire ground floor of the Pompidou Centre (looks like a disused factory), or a vast black marquee in the grounds of the Musée Rodin (Dior), holding at least a thousand people sitting in stands as if watching football, the models emerging from a translucent wall like a medieval stained-glass window, with the "Raindrop Prelude" belting out at a volume loud enough to be the Hailstone Prelude. Or a huge room (Chanel) rumoured to have once been a bank, beautifully decorated with paper flowers, entirely in white, to look like the fairytale palace of the Snow Queen.
The models were always beautiful, but there are differences. Today's girls work for lots of houses, sometimes several shows in a day, up to 30 of them walking swiftly by in teetering shoes; they have to be more or less interchangeable, girls and clothes much the same size - which is nine feet high and four inches wide, with expressions that are always stonefaced and frequently sour. Models were always aloof, of course, but in Lanvin and Nina Ricci they were even sometimes allowed to smile. Back then they mostly worked for an individual designer and for far longer, not just the one show, and changed frantically in the cabine from one outfit to another. I remember Pierre Balmain praising one with pale hair and a white skin. "She is colourless!" he said - so he could design for her as on a blank sheet.
One difference that struck me right away was that everyone was taking photographs - not just a heaving bank of mostly male photographers at one end, looking like something out of Brueghel, but everyone else on their mobiles. In my day the couture houses were paranoid about secrecy, about the fear of being copied - which they constantly were, of course. You weren't even allowed to sketch, let alone photograph - one of my friends was barred from all the shows for doing so. "I drew in Dior," she wept. Which didn't stop commercial buyers having someone with a photographic memory race back to his hotel room and frantically draw - and I suppose I can admit, after 50 years, that once when I was stuck a friendly fashion chain let me have some of such pirated sketches for the Observer. There were embargoes and release dates, and magazines weren't even allowed to photograph the models until weeks after the shows; you had to choose the girls, choose the clothes and then come back for the actual photo shoot.

The endless moment

2009-01-30T10:05:00.004Z

I sometimes think that fashion only has two moments, endlessly copied: court of Marie Antoinette and Thirties film star:

Here are both in Lacroix's couture show this week.

Men prepare to grab that all-important bargain at the sales

2009-01-29T12:45:00.002Z

On the catwalk

2009-01-29T11:39:00.003Z

Ines de la Fressange, aged 51, on the catwalk for Jean-Paul Gaultier at the Paris Couture collections.

Fashion models “are not just 14-year-olds,” Mr. Gaultier said later. “There are no [age] barriers to beauty.” The French designer explained that the curvy Ms. de la Fressange embodied the sexuality demanded his raunchy Spanish themed show, which also featured high-waisted pinstripe pants for women, suspenders and elbow-length gloves.

Ines' curves and mine are slightly different in scale.

Several things

2009-01-29T08:07:00.003Z

NPR's All Things Considered had a rather good review of The Clothes on Their Backs, yesterday afternoon. It's only a couple of minutes, you can listen online

In the US Scribner will be publishing The Thoughtful Dresser, (the book) but not until next year, so if you are in the US and can't wait, you can order from UK amazon (see link at the side) or The Book Depository which offers free shipping but for some reason does not allow pre-orders (the £ by the way is pitifully low against the $ at the moment, around 1.42, so I'd doubt if you would save anything by waiting).

I will be doing an event at Jewish Book Week on The Thoughtful Dresser (the book, see side panel) in the company of the book's main interviewee, Catherine Hill, who survived Auschwitz to become the doyenne of Toronto fashion. She is coming over to London specially for this event, which will be chaired by Linda Kelsey, former editor of Cosmpolitan. You don't have to be Jewish to attend and it would be very nice to meet some of the regular readers in person. The event is at 7pm on Thursday 26 February. Tickets are £8 and you can book here

The self-making jeans

2009-01-28T09:13:00.002Z

Balmain has produced a pair of jeans which cost £1059 - there they are, above. Here's Sarah Mower offering Balmain's explanation of the art of making distressed jeans.

Take two: Monday morning and I find myself at Alexis Mabille's show in Paris, sitting next to a woman in a Balmain tennis-ball shouldered jacket and faded black skinny jeans. She is the beautiful, cool, 30-something Emmanuelle Alt, a French Vogue stylist who is the muse-consultant to Christophe Decarnin, Balmain's man of the moment.

I ask her about the recession-defying price of the hit house denim. "Oh, yes, they are so expensive," she agrees, but goes on to explain that they're all hand-made and every last rip is finished in the atelier. "There are so many processes, the dyeing, the washing, the fraying." All this could be done at a fraction of the cost in China. "But, you know, it is all made in France." (Note to the outraged: can keeping skilled workers in Europe in employment be a bad thing?)

Then the big question jumped out of my mouth: what jeans was she wearing? I'm sure Alt has plenty of Balmain denim at her disposal, but that wasn't what she had on the other morning. " Oh, Topshop," she shrugged. "Really old."

I looked over and noticed they were developing a little hole above the knee.

How to play a Hollywood Nazi

2009-01-27T21:07:00.006Z

Not like this (above)

Like this

And utterly irrelevant

2009-01-27T14:00:00.001Z

Tuesday lunchtime: post of no consequence

2009-01-27T13:17:00.000Z

Hussein Chalayan at the Design Museum

2009-01-27T09:53:00.007Z

I went to the Hussein Chalayan show at the Design Museum last week, as part of a repetore of five arts related openings for the BBC's saturday review show. It helped ameliorate the rage of watching Tom Cruise cast as a Nazi in Valkyrie (great story, shame about the casting, script and direction) . My fellow panellists agreed that the Chalayan show was a blast of fresh air from the future. Indeed it was a futuristic show.

Chalayan says his influences are migration, that sort of thing, not making beautiful frocks for averagely endowed women. He's really an installation/performance artist. Yet once you have gawped at the dress with lasers, you can't help but notice that he also produces lovely wearable clothes.

The American church hat

2009-01-25T10:52:00.002Z

Vicki Woods ponders the church hat. On Sundays in London we see many elderly black women on their way to church in hats, making a pleasant contrast with the ubiquitous weekend leisurewear all around

I'd forgotten there is a demographic of hatty people in America – millions strong. The matriarchs who pack out the gospel churches always wear the full fig (hats, gloves, best coats). And, of course, it was a church hat Franklin wore, out of R-E-S-P-E-C-T for a pretty churchy occasion.

So, I was wrong about the absence of milliners. The Queen of Soul is from Detroit; and so is her hatter Luke Song, who runs the business (started by his Korean-immigrant mother) for a clientele of "90 per cent churchgoing African-American women". He made Aretha's grey felt cloche with the hugely oversized bow for about $400 (£290); I thought she looked fabulous in it and I wasn't alone. Almost as soon as My Country 'Tis of Thee died away, Song was hit by a Diana wedding-dress-style tsunami and he's rushing out lookalikes (for $179) and buying up all the felt he can find. He told the Detroit Free Press that, "people are calling from England, asking for the hat, I'm shocked".

I'm mildly shocked, myself. We have the world's most fashionable hatters (Stephen Jones and Philip Treacy.) There's no call to start Googling "detroit hat aretha" in search of gala headgear, when people can pick up hats influenced by these brilliant milliners in any high street. (The Princess Royal bought her Queen Mother funeral hat in Debenhams.)

Alas, Aretha Franklin, at nearly 70, is not of an age to start a trend among young London fashionables for splashy over-sized church hats (more's the pity). Young women in this country don't wear hats any more, unless forced to by protocol. Even then, they prefer "fascinators", which are basically exaggerated hairslides with feathers, worn tipped over one ear. But Stephen Jones and Philip Treacy make those, too.

125 years of Jaeger

2009-01-24T22:36:00.002Z

Here's my piece in the Telegraph on Jaeger's 125th anniversary

Jaeger was for women who wanted sophisticated, quality clothes – the tweed suit and little black dress – but who could not afford to go to Paris. Its flagship store on Regent Street, opened in the 1930s, was a cathedral of plate glass and chrome modernism. Like Viyella and Windsmoor, it occupied a middle-class niche. The ideal customer was the wife of a home-counties stockbroker. Self-made men and their spouses (like my parents) aspired to Jaeger, the next best thing to a Savile Row suit. From 1956, when Jean Muir joined the company, the label started to attract a younger clientele. Muir was one of several British contemporaries, including Mary Quant, who were beginning to move away from Parisian couture towards what would become the archetypal British fashions of the 1960s, more casual and more geared to what was then called 'sportswear’.
As a teenager in the 1960s I was caught between Carnaby Street and Jaeger’s innovative label, Young Jaeger. My mother was always guiding me into its Liverpool branch offering to pay for separates modelled in the advertisements by Jean Shrimpton and photographed by David Bailey. They were urban and chic, more Yves Saint Laurent than Granny Takes a Trip, an antidote in her mind to the hippie excesses of the velvet bell-bottoms and Afghan coats I was wearing. Young Jaeger, she believed, would put me on the path to adult smartness. And it was difficult not to covet Jaeger in the 1960s because it gave provincial young women (and men) a scent of sophistication.

Some women

2009-01-24T10:17:00.004Z

The Guardian has a slideshow of Obama's women. Above is Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor. There's nothing I like more than seeing a woman who looks like she's been round the block a few times, giving powerful men a piece of her mind.

Change from top to bottom

2009-01-23T09:14:00.003Z

I was impressed by Hillary's first appearance as Secretary of State and particularly with the appointment of George Mitchell as special envoy to the Middle East. Drinking in every word of his speech, particularly this:

"Conflicts are created, conducted and sustained by human beings - they can be ended by human beings. I saw it happen in Northern Ireland," he said.
"I believe deeply that with committed and persevering, patient diplomacy it can happen in the Middle East."

While listening attentively to the briefing on CNN, which also appointed Richard Holbrooke as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, I noticed two things - the number of times all parties used the word diplomacy, and um, Hillary's very very good hair colour.

In the hand

2009-01-22T12:44:00.004Z

At both the Booker and the South Bank Show awards, I carried a loaned sample Anya Hindmarch Pipkin from the SS09 range. It come in gold, silver, black and white and I have the gold on order.

I'm not normally a fan of the clutch but with evening wear, there's something about a tote or a shoulder bag that looks wrong. You need to learn to clamp under the arm.

Now here we have an outfit

2009-01-22T09:54:00.003Z

I was completely unaware until this morning that amongst Michelle Obama's cousins there is a rabbi

And his everyday workwear takes some beating, let alone what he wore to the inauguration

And so we turn to the junior members of the party

2009-01-22T07:06:00.004Z

You can't get the coats just yet. The double-breasted blue coat Malia wore, and the light pink one Sasha wore, both accessoried with satin and velvet ribbons tied around the waist, were specially designed for the girls by the American chain J Crew. This company has been a favourite with Michelle Obama - the green leather gloves she wore to keep out the Washington cold were also from the label. In the week it was revealed that Sarah Palin had been given a $150,000 wardrobe budget for campaign outfits, Michelle appeared on Jay Leno's show in an outfit from J Crew, thereby endearing herself to millions of Americans with her choice of safe but stylish - and, crucially, affordable - clothes. The company says that "highlights" from the girls' outfits will be available in its 2009 autumn collection.
Emine Saner

Malia looks like she's ready to set the world on fire already, and she's only ten.

Who needs a crown when you have a hat?

2009-01-21T14:40:00.001Z

American monarch

(The cloche, decorated with a Swarovski crystal encrusted bow, cost $179 (£129) and came from Mr Song Millinery in Detroit, the Motor City, where Luke Song has been making hats for 25 years.)

Childish but . . .

2009-01-21T12:14:00.001Z

Rahm Emmanuel gives his personal send off to the Bush presidency

Once upon a time in America

2009-01-21T07:12:00.001Z

It's all here

Gershwin knew it was coming

Close analysis of the outfit

2009-01-21T06:42:00.004Z

Personally, I wasn't crazy about it because I thought it was a little matronly but here's what others have to say:

Here is a bolder woman, a serious woman from Chicago and Harvard who is not afraid to express herself with fashion, and it is the kind of confidence that many women will recognize in themselves. Her clothes tell us that she has an adventurous spirit, as well as a sense of humor, and if some of these garments have almost an old-fashioned womanly quality, then they tell us that she is indeed not your average fashionista.
Her inaugural outfit, designed by Isabel Toledo, was made of Swiss wool lace, backed with netting for warmth, and lined in French silk. Mrs. Obama also wore a cardigan over the sleeveless dress, as a buffer to the cold. She had on pale green leather gloves and a flat, latticelike necklace with clear stones.
Long considered a designer’s designer because of her attention to craft and her sensitivity to unusual detail, Ms. Toledo said she made the yellow outfit especially for Mrs. Obama. But until she saw the new first lady on television leaving Blair House for the trip to the Capitol with her husband, she did not know positively whether Mrs. Obama would wear the clothes or something from another designer. There has been a fair amount of secrecy around Mrs. Obama’s inaugural wardrobe, and even the designers who were asked to make clothes for her said they were not told in advance which outfits she would choose.
“I wanted to pick a very optimistic color, that had sunshine,” Ms. Toledo said in a telephone interview from her studio in New York. “I wanted her to feel charmed, and in that way would charm everybody else.”

Interesting that she's now worn two Cuban-American designers (Donna Karan, Oscar de la Renta and Ralph Lauren must be spitting tacks) - perhaps signalling an end to the absurd US trade policy with Cuba

What I wanted to hear

2009-01-21T06:40:00.000Z

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

Sir Tom, me and that hat

2009-01-20T21:49:00.003Z

To the Dorchester for the South Bank Show Awards lunch in which the literature award was won by me, presented by Sir Tom Stoppard. I kissed him. Twice.

Then over to American friends watch the inauguration in which the show was stolen by Aretha Franklin in that hat

Everyone crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man

2009-01-20T08:30:00.002Z

More later.

Mattel's Nigerian Barbie

2009-01-19T09:19:00.006Z

As Barbie turns fifty this year, her protean qualities are revealed

Lots more here

Contrary to WASPy appearances, by the way, Barbie is Jewish

Donna Karan Barbie

Dior hats in the 60s

2009-01-16T09:00:00.003Z

Before size 0

2009-01-15T14:13:00.004Z

The V&A is just about to republish a delightful little book called How To Dress For Success by the Hollywood costume designer Edith Head. First published in 1967, Head meant it to be a manual for ordinary American women, both housewives and 'career girls'. It is a riveting period piece but what I noticed was the chapter in which she adviseds women on how to dress according to their size. The smallest sizes she cites are US 6, 8 and 10. There is no 4, 2 or 0. This tallies with my recollection of Britain in the 60s when only teeny, birdlike girls could fit into an 8 and most of were 12 or 14, or 10 if you were small. No-one I knew had an eating disorder (lack of central heating in most homes made eating salad in winter inadvisable). No-one was on a diet. . No-one ate fast food or ready meals. No-one was overweight. We now seem to be striving for mythical sizes. It's all in our heads.

Groomed within an inch of his life

2009-01-15T10:34:00.003Z

Mickey Rourke shows the girls how to do it*

*For further explication, see here

and by special request (see comments)

What shall I wear to the party?

2009-01-14T08:53:00.004Z

Lacroix sketch

Not me, my invitation to one of the many inaugural balls has unaccountably been lost in the post, though I do know someone who is going. Her husband appointed Obama to the position of president of the Harvard Law Review.

But what about the soon to be First Lady? Not an Oscar dress will have more attention this one, heavy with meanings, as Lisa Armstrong points out in the Times:

Bottom line, she's a good-looking woman who knows her way around upmarket labels (in the past year she has worn, among more predictable names, Thakoon and Rodarte, both up and coming darlings of New York Fashion Week). Fashionable, in a user-friendly way, she even made it onto Vanity Fair's 2008 Best Dressed list. She can wear just about any colour and she's the first First Lady since Jackie Kennedy who can anoint trends and sell out a dress (viz, the black and white sundress she wore to guest host ABC's The View). As Peter Som, another New York talent, says: “What she wears has a huge impact on fashion. From day one she has shown her own modern style that many women can identify with or aspire to.” For an industry reeling from the recession, what's not to like?
They'll find something. Because ultimately these outfits are sartorial landmines waiting to happen. They must transcend class, colour and financial barriers. Ideally they should impress, endear and unite. Really it's like asking a blanket to bring world peace, and be fascinating at the same time. On a slightly more attainable level, Letitia Baldridge, a former social secretary to Jackie Kennedy recently noted of Mrs Obama: “It would be wrong for today's First Lady to go around like a princess all the time. But I think it would be very wrong when she's on an official job to be dressed too casually. She's always got to be a bit above.” In short, if her husband is President, “she always has to watch everything ”. And you thought it was just a dress

Mary Quant

2009-01-13T11:25:00.001Z

Mary Quant, now in her seventies, is interviewed about her mini skirt being commemorated on a Royal Mail stamp as an example of 60s design.

There is one way to age gracefully, retaining your style without the facelifts. Love too the upper class accent from an earlier era

I do not like pockets

2009-01-13T10:31:00.001Z

We are supposed to replace bags with the newly fashionable pockets, ruining the line of your clothes . And what's with those pockets set directly inside the side seam so you look like a chicken trying to get your elbows into them, and bulging out your hips?

"I'm obsessed with pockets," says Anita Borzyszkowska, of Gap, a store that has been at the forefront of the pocket revival on the high street, from hoodie-style pouches on sweater dresses to Chanel-style patches on cardigans and invisible slips sewn into the side seams of dresses. Borzyszkowska - whose personal pocket tally for the day is seven (jeans plus a boyfriend-style cardigan) - cites Gap's collaboration two years ago with the designer Roland Mouret as the turning point. His collection of 10 dresses, much lauded at launch for its jolliness of colour and blousy styling, was in fact conceived with something else in mind. "One of the goals," says Borzyszkowska, "was for everything to have a pocket."

I tried on those Roalnd Mouret dresses and the pockets was the reason I didn't buy one.